Risk and D&D

Hillariously, I was digging through my shelves not too long ago and I stumbled across a whole slew of empire building games.  You know the kind...   Risk, Shogun, that sort of game.   So pulling out some simple blank paper, I started laying them out over the reversed side of the board.

There I was, standing there, looking at a blank game board.  Nothing of note there when my room mate spoke up and said I should draw my game world map on it.   I kind of blinked a few times and asked, "Which one?  There are two."

"The one we are currently in.   It would help us out in our mass scheming."

Then it sank it.   He was right.  I have drawn hundreds of maps over the years.  Each time redefining the political borders of the world as time has advanced and changed or where the predominate language and dialect is spoken.   I've even redrawn them to show the environmental effects of massive cataclysms that the players failed to stop or were responsible for themselves.  Ruined and lost cities, ancient relic locations that have long been lost to time.   In fact, it is odd pulling out a bit of parchment from folder and tossing a stack of unlabled maps that I know what they are that only show a year... sometimes two or three hundred years out of date and watch players pour over those maps for clues or a fragment of information that might lead them to where the villain is or where a lost item of power is at.

But never have they had a giant map they could push counters across like it was a Risk board or one of those battle maps you see generals and world leaders standing over in movies, documentaries, and photos.  I have so many silly old games no one plays anymore...   the version of risk I have still uses the old three pointed and five pointed counters for the armies and not the molded figures you see today.   So nicely generic.   Lord of the Rings Monopoly...  odd christmas gift because they thought since I liked fantasy... but it still has money in the original rubber bands BUT it did have tiny forts and castles instead of houses and hotels.   Shogun?  Hundreds of tiny color coded samurai and two stage castles.

I got nearly everything I need honestly to do something up for my players.   I just need to pick up a couple medieval or civil war standard bearers to represent major generals in the world and get to painting them up with the major house banners and I am set.

It is odd though how the moment a massive game board comes out, people's perceptions change.  I am currently using the back of my never used World of Warcraft: The Board Game map as the future backing of the board... something that had only given me an infinite supply of cheap D8s to pretty much throw about or use as the cores of dice buildings and tons of cheap monster stand ins in the years since I wasted money on it.   Glad to see it get one more use out of it.   Now, if I can get a use of the cards, I will have scavanged it for everything it is worth.

Well...   I'll try to post updates as I go on this...  going to have to start marking out the province borders properly of the surface and the two major underdark regions.